“I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.”
-Isaiah 41:18
In the wake of so many sad headlines today, so many stories of life lost, cut off too quickly and senselessly, I’m grateful for this promise. It certainly feels like we’ve just been through barren heights and deep valleys. I believe that we all know what parched ground and parched mouths feel like after a year full of so much loss and tension and division. Wandering around in a desert of isolation feels like something most of us are familiar with after this past year and all that we weathered through together, but this is where the upside down and backwards nature of the gospel comes trickling in, like the Spring that melts away the winter in Narnia. And all that frozen, barren landscape in the heights, when exposed to the love and light of God, begins to melt, and what you thought would be forever winter, turns out to be the water running down the mountain into a river that roars to life, and with it brings all things bright and beautiful… the brand new green leaves and buds of flowers bursting forth joined by a chorus of bees humming that winter is never the end of the story, singing that there can be rest and refreshment even in the desert places, and whistling like the birds who keep waking up early each morning, that the sun always rises, and that if you are thirsty, you can come and drink from well of love that won’t dry up.
This verse encapsulates so much of what I experienced this past year or two, as I visited the deepest wounds in my own story and some deep wounds in our nation and our world. I’m averse to pain... I suppose most people are, and so I’ve generally spent most of my life running from it, but as I’ve traversed into the depths of sorrow on a personal and global level, I’ve encountered living water… the kind of Love that holds you even when you’re falling apart and reminds you that you’re going to be ok because suffering never gets the final word. I can’t shake it. Visiting some of the places of pain I thought might kill me some days. It’s certainly not an easy journey, but as it turns out, as I was breathing in those wounded and weary places, I encountered grace and love and a sense of belonging that I’ve never experienced before, and what I thought was going to kill me, actually starting making me come alive! Rivers on barren heights. Springs of love and light running through the depths of my sorrow, and a thirst that was quenched in the most surprising and lovely of ways.
Have you seen this to be true in your life? I hope so, and if not, I hope that you’ll have the courage to breathe and grieve and lament in the places you need to, so you can encounter the current of LOVE that will meet you even there and find that you are held together even as you are falling apart. Tell me all the stories of finding rivers in the desert. I’m here for it, and as always, it encourages me to keep my eyes open when I am having a desert day or season, to remember to look for the underground reservoirs of peace and love that are ever-present.
